"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." - from George Eliot’s Middlemarch

You may have noticed I've been MIA for a few months now. *looks guilty* Sorry guys. I was busy with moving and changing schools. I'm now settled down again and have the free time to spend online.

As for real life everything is great. More than great in fact. Everything has gone swimmingly. I love my new apartment, new college, new city, and new classes. I've been pleasantly surprised how well everything has worked out. I've met so many nice new people and I adore living in a city. Everything in my life is going terrifically in fact. I can't complain at all, which probably why I've been so quiet lately. There's nothing to complain about. Literally I'm content, happy, and feeling very lucky.

But I do have a funny story to tell about meeting a fellow fan at college.

One of the required courses for my major is Business Writing, a course that could be re-entitled "a cross-discipline view of the basics of format and style with a tiny emphasis toward professional communication but so broad you'll already know everything taught in this course." It's an easy class with a laid back attitude and I enjoy it, since I tend to like most classes that involve writing somehow. As we learn basic concepts like writing towards a specific audience and the use of discipline specific lexicons I always relate everything to fan fiction. (Okay I relate all my classes to fan fiction, but that's beside the point.) I'm always thinking "writing to an audience familiar with the subject's terminology" that just like writing an article for metafandom and throwing out slash, fen, chan, femslash, gen and assuming everyone understands what you're talking about.

Anyway, so I'm thinking about fan fiction the whole time and imagining how I would apply concepts in the class to metafandom, which in turn helps me to apply the information to the subject at hand - writing a report about scholarly articles in computer science. I notice the sweet girl who sits in front of me has on a Harry Potter t-shirt. And I have this little epiphany. Hmm, I bet she writes fan fiction. I'm not sure what told me that she was a Fan with a capitol F, and not a regular fan who wasn't familiar with the online communities of fandom. Somehow I just knew.

So I asked her after class and lo and behold, I was right! I had spotted another Fan. She's active in specific HP communities and pretty involved. It was amazing since I didn't truly know anything about her but after talking to her a few times in class I could spot someone else who shared my interests. It's really rare to be meet others who share your hobbies when they're somewhat embarrassing, like fan fiction porn. And since fandom tends to stay hidden, it's even more unique to make a friend in RL the same way I might online.